A mysterious light was spotted soaring across the sky over Victoria just after midnight, before some witnesses claimed they heard a 'boom' and felt the ground shake.
Footage of the unexpected astronomy event was recorded across the state, from Melbourne CBD to Mount Buller, which is about 200km from the city.
With speculation the soaring light was a meteor, Swinburne University astronomer Alan Duffy has told 3AW he would tip that "the quite extraordinary sight" was caused by space junk.
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"What we're seeing is a large flash of light extended...It burns up for 30-40 seconds. It's breaking up. All of that is telling me that is space junk. That is not a small piece of natural occurring rock in space - a meteor," he said.
"It's something very large, probably a couple of tonnes.
"In some of the videos you can even see that there are colours in those flashing burning up pieces.
The light appeared to be much closer to the earth than other astronomy events, but Duffy said it would "tens of kilometres above" the ground at least.
https://omny.fm/shows/3aw-breakfast-with-ross-and-john/the-mysterious-light-seen-flying-through-the-sky-l/embedHe said reports that people had heard a 'loud bang', believed to be a sonic boom, was "something extraordinary".
"Some of those pieces must have been very dense to make it to the surface."
In terms of reports of the ground shaking, Geoscience Australia identified seismic signals near north-west Melbourne, which normally relate to earthquakes.
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